Michael Dorn and Marina Sirtis Spin tales of sTar Trek: The Next Generation

“I was unemployed, and I auditioned six times for this job,” Marina Sirtis says of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). “They said ‘you’re guaranteed for a year’… It was all financial for me.” “It was good money for the pilot,” says Dorn. Michael Dorn’s agents didn’t even know what a Klingon was. “It turned out to be the best job we ever had and ever will have,” says Sirtis. “The best part of it was the seven of us” says Dorn.

Dorn and Sirtis hated each other for the first year. For some reason, Sirtis invited Dorn to play tennis with her brother and the two of them got along really well. When Sirtis invited Dorn for dinner, he went to the house and saw Sirtis cooking and taking care of her guests and brother.

“Where’s Marina? What did you do with her?” Dorn thought.

From that moment, they were friends.

“There’s not a lot of stuff that gets on film that’s adlibbed,” says Michael Dorn. “It was a latex headpiece that was like a cap,” says Dorn about the Worf costume. It also had a nose piece and a beard. “It was all glued on.” The prosthetic and the process that he had to go through caused blisters, but Dorn didn’t want to make waves. Marina Sirtis convinced him to stand up for himself. The makeup was going to scar him for life, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. He went in and gave an ultimatum. “That’s when they said, ‘You know, I think we can change it,’” says Dorn. Sirtis and Brent Spiner went through the same thing with contacts. For the first season, the contacts were painted. Sirtis would open up the contact case and the saline solution would be black. Sirtis fought to get contacts made by an actual ophthalmologist. Spiner came to her and told her that they wanted him to go back to the old contacts because the new ones weren’t yellow enough. “You’re gold. It doesn’t matter if they’re yellow enough, you’re effin’ gold,” Sirtis told him. As Data, Spiner was integral to the show. Sirtis stuck up for her “peoples.” When Counselor Troi and Commander Riker got together on TNG, Worf was still on the ship. “I thought they had a missed opportunity,” says Dorn. The whole Worf, Riker, Troi triangle “was a good story, but they didn’t take it far enough.” “Life is a journey, and I think that’s what Worf finally figured out,” says Dorn.